Democracy-as-a-wrapper
If you build a company that depends critically on another company's technology, your business is at the whim of that other company's strategy. It happened before with Google (e.g., changes in its ranking algorithm wreaking havoc downstream), it is happening now with Anthropic and OpenAI, who have been subsidizing their growth with massive discounts (and massive losses). When one of these giants makes a change to their business model, whether it is a pricing hike (link) or a decision to go into a niche occupied by a "wrapper" (pdf summarizer, email writer), it may trigger a mini extinction event. So if something is free (or close enough), you are the product (link I got it from Tim O'Reilly).
And indeed, the giants tolerate or even nurture the wrappers in the name of growth and market share. For some time. Being a wrapper is great until it is disastrous. Being a successful wrapper for a long time breeds complacency and brittleness. When the price is no longer 0, there is hell to pay, literally.
It suddenly dawned on me that democratic middle powers, the subject of Mark Carney's wakeup call t̶o̶ ̶a̶r̶m̶s̶ in Davos this week (link), became prosperous democratic wrappers that got used to their cheap API access to the biggie, the USA, in the past 80 years. And boy was it a win for the USA as well, mostly unprecedented growth for 80 years.
Whether or not you support the new business model of American diplomacy, it is clear that the single-API wrapper model is in grave danger: you either become a subsidiary (Greenland? Canada?) or you have to build your own stack. The smaller wrappers, say Belgium or Ireland, have never been under any illusion that their model was autonomous. But the democratic middle powers had a rude awakening in 2025: the terms and conditions for API access have been radically altered. They entertained an illusion of autonomy and power that has been shattered. Carney's "wrappers of the world, unite!" speech is both an acknowledgment of that change and a "values-based" way forward. Canada beefed up its China API access, hedging its bets but remaining dependent on another biggie, albeit one with a different pricing model. What will the European middle powers do? They had a habit of bullying their smaller neighbors, will they now empathize? It will be hard for any one of them to build the entire stack, but will they overcome their divergences to build it together?
It is not an accident that the World Economic Forum's Davos event was the most interesting and vibrant in years: the EU was becoming as exciting as a barnacle but it now has a moment. Will it seize it?